James Thomas Farrell (February 27, 1904 – August 22, 1979) was an American
novelist, short-story writer and
poet.
He is most remembered for the Studs Lonigantrilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and a television series in 1979.
Biography
Farrell was born in
Chicago, to a large
Irish-American family which included siblings Earl, Joseph, Helen, John and Mary. In addition, there were several other siblings who died during childbirth, as well as one who died from the
1918 flu pandemic. His father was a
teamster, and his mother a domestic servant. His parents were too poor to provide for him, and he went to live with his grandparents when he was three years old.[1] Farrell attended
Mt. Carmel High School, then known as St. Cyril, with future
EgyptologistRichard Anthony Parker. He then later attended the
University of Chicago. He began writing when he was 21 years old. A novelist, journalist, and short story writer, he was known for his realistic descriptions of the working class
South Side Irish, especially in the novels about the character Studs Lonigan. Farrell based his writing on his own experiences, particularly those that he included in his celebrated "Danny O'Neill Pentalogy" series of five novels.
Among the writers who acknowledged Farrell as an inspiration was
Norman Mailer:
Mr. Mailer intended to major in aeronautical engineering, but by the time he was a sophomore, he had fallen in love with literature. He spent the summer reading and rereading James T. Farrell's "Studs Lonigan," John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" and John Dos Passos's "U.S.A.," and he began, or so he claimed, to set himself a daily quota of 3,000 words of his own, on the theory that this was the way to get bad writing out of his system. By 1941 he was sufficiently purged to win the Story magazine prize for best short story written by an undergraduate.[2]
Within the Workers' Party, Goldman and Farrell worked closely. In 1948, they developed criticisms of its policies, claiming that the party should endorse the
Marshall Plan and also
Norman Thomas'
presidential candidacy. Having come to believe that only capitalism
could defeat
Stalinism, they left to join the
Socialist Party of America. During the late 1960s, disenchanted with the political "center", while impressed with the SWP's involvement in the Civil Rights and US anti-Vietnam War movements, he reestablished communication with his former comrades of two decades earlier. Farrell attended one or more SWP-sponsored Militant Forum events (probably in NYC), but never rejoined the Trotskyist movement.
Farrell was married three times, to two women. He married his first wife Dorothy Butler in 1931. After divorcing her, in 1941 he married stage actress
Hortense Alden, with whom he had two sons, Kevin and John. They divorced in 1955, and later that year he remarried
Dorothy Farrell. They separated again in 1958 but remained legally married until his death. She died in 2005.[3]
Legacy
According to William McCann:
No writer has described a specific area of American society so thoroughly and comprehensively as Farrell did in the seven novels of Studs Lonigan and Danny O'Neill (1932-43). A consummate realist in viewpoint and method, he turned repeatedly in his fiction to the subject he knew best, the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Chicago's South Side. Drawing on lacerating personal experience, Farrell wrote about people who were victims of injurious social circumstances and of their own spiritual and intellectual shortcomings. He depicted human frustration, ignorance, cruelty, violence, and moral degeneration with sober, relentless veracity....Despite his Marxist leanings, Farrell's fiction is not that of a reformer, or a doctrinaire theorist, but rather the patient humorless representation of ways of life and states of mind he abhors....Farrell’s place in American letters, however, as certainly the most industrious and probably the most powerful writer in the naturalistic tradition stemming from
Frank Norris and
Dreiser, was solidly established with the Lonegan--O'Neil series....His later novels are lamented and ignored.[4]
The Studs Lonigan trilogy was voted number 29 on the
Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.[5]
On the 100th anniversary of Farrell's birth,
Norman Mailer was a panelist at the
New York Public Library's "James T. Farrell Centenary Celebration" on February 25, 2004 along with
Pete Hamill,
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and moderator Donald Yannella. They discussed Farrell's life and legacy.
A World I Never Made (1936) (First book of the Danny O'Neill pentalogy)
Can All This Grandeur Perish? and Other Stories (1937)
No Star Is Lost (1938) (Second book of the Danny O'Neill pentalogy)
Tommy Gallagher's Crusade (1939)
Father and Son (1940) (Third book of the Danny O'Neill pentalogy)
The Bill of Rights in danger!: the meaning of the Minneapolis convictions [New York] : Civil Rights Defense Committee, (1941)
Decision (1941)
Ellen Rogers (1941)
$1000 a Week and Other Stories (1942)
My Days of Anger (1943) (Fourth book of the Danny O'Neill pentalogy)
"To Whom It May Concern and Other Stories" (1944)
Who are the 18 prisoners in the Minneapolis Labor Case?: how the Smith "Gag" Act has endangered workers rights and free speech [New York] : Civil Rights Defense Committee, (1944)
"The League of Frightened Philistines and Other Papers" (1945)
Bernard Clare (1946) (First book of the Bernard Carr trilogy)
"When Boyhood Dreams Come True and Other Stories" (1946)
"The Life Adventurous and Other Stories" (1947)
Literature and Morality (1947)
Truth and myth about America New York, N.Y. : Rand School Press : Distributed by the Rand Bookstore (1949)
The Road Between (1949) (Second book of the Bernard Carr trilogy)
An American Dream Girl (1950)
The Name Is Fogarty: Private Papers on Public Matters (1950)
This Man and This Woman (1951)
Yet Other Waters (1952) (Third book of the Bernard Carr trilogy)
The Face of Time (1953) (Final book of the Danny O'Neill pentalogy)
Reflections at Fifty and Other Essays (1954)
French Girls Are Vicious and Other Stories (1955)
A Dangerous Woman and Other Stories (1957)
My Baseball Diary (1957)
It Has Come To Pass (1958)
Boarding House Blues (1961)
Side Street and Other Stories (1961)
"Sound of a City" (1962)
The Silence of History (1963)
What Time Collects (1964)
A Glass of Milk, in "Why Work Series" editor
Gordon Lish (1966)
Lonely for the Future (1966)
When Time Was Born (1966)
New Year's Eve/1929 (1967)
A Brand New Life (1968)
Childhood Is Not Forever (1969)
Judith (1969) Signed limited edition, 300 printed
Invisible Swords (1971)
Judith and Other Stories (1973)
The Dunne Family (1976)
Olive and Mary Anne (1977)
The Death of Nora Ryan (1978)
Posthumous editions
Eight Short, Short Stories (1981)
Sam Holman (1994)
Hearing Out James T. Farrell: Selected Lectures (1997)
Salzman, Jack. "James T. Farrell: An Essay in Bibliography." Resources for American Literary Study 6.2 (1976): 131-163
online.
Wald, Alan M. (1987). The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. University of North Carolina Press.
ISBN0-8078-4169-2.